There is a joke in my household – how many trips to Lowe’s will it take Burch (dad) to fix something? It takes multiple trips because I often don’t know the full scope of what I am dealing with until I am in the middle of it. That same concept applies to the rebuild of our indexes with the new metadata – it seemed like an easy enough task until we hit issues that we were not expecting and I feel like I need to understand them.

As you can imagine we have various logging processes. One of those records details about the filings we download in to our EdgarIndex database. This is based on the RSS feed which we inspect about every 10 minutes. I was using our EdgarIndex to collect fresh copies of 2021 10-K filings and there was a logging message that this filing was not available (www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1108524/000110852421000014/0001108524-21-000014.txt) today (8/8/2025). This seemed weird because our system is pretty robust, I was pretty sure that entry was not the result of a system hallucination. I went to EDGAR and confirmed, that filing is no longer accessible. The CIK (1108524) is Salesforce.com’s

Time to do some research – I verified that the log entry was valid in the sense that there was nothing unexpected about it. I then went to check to see if we had a 10-K filing that matched the expected RDATE-CDATE-FVALUE based on the log entry. Since the log entry showed the filing was their 12/31/2021 10-K which was accepted at 4:51 PM on 3/17/2021 and we downloaded it at 5:05 PM I expected to see a 10-K in an RDATE-CDATE-FVALUE folder labeled R20210317-C20201231-F14. The 10-K was present.

However, there is no filing on EDGAR – so I was curious and went to their landing page on EDGAR and I saw instead an entry for a filing with a calendar year 2022 accession number.

We have that one as well. This is another example of why we don’t use the Filing Date as a primary indicator in our archive. That particular version was submitted on 2/24/2022 at 4:13 PM. So it turns out that we have two copies of this filing, the original one and the replacement. I pulled the feed from 2/24/2022 and confirmed that this was one of two filings (the other was a 10-Q submitted on 6/1/2020). Deleted on 2/24/2022 by Salesforce.com.

Because we have the original (3/17/2021) filing as well as the replacement submitted on 2/24/2022 I was more than curious about what changed. I compared the documents between the two filings. The only content changes were additional redactions in the NEWER version of an exhibit related to the aircraft timeshare agreement between Mr. Benioff and Salesforce.com. I was lazy I just used the DocumentExtractionTextOnly feature to pull the text from the filing and each of the exhibits. I then read in each line as a list and also created a set (to address blank lines and then compared each of the documents (from the old and new filings). I looked for lines in one that were not in the other using set operations.

The newer version had the model/type of the plane redacted as well as the home base and contact information for someone who I suspect is Mr. Benioff’s CPA/Financial Advisor.

Finally – to my point – why redact once the filing has been released? Given the length of time between the original filing and the deletion I idly searched for some of the lines that were newly redacted. I found four hits when searching Google for “certain Gulfstream GVI (G650ER)“. Here is a link to one of those four searches (Justia Hit) That content was redacted in the replacement filing. Here is the result of that search in directEDGAR in the 2021-2024 10-K index collection.

I reported above that there was a 10-Q filing that was also updated on the same date. The original 10-Q was filed on 6/1/2020. It had even more details about the aircraft that was subject to the time sharing agreement than the 10-K. The agreement in that 10-Q is also publicly available through other sources.

Given the persistence of information disseminated on the internet I just don’t understand why Salesforce.com devoted the money and especially the time to do these redactions. It is not automatic. They had to contact the SEC, there were probably two attorneys who reviewed the content and maybe 19 letters (that is an exaggeration) to the SEC to convince them there was a valid reason to pull and replace the filings. Sure, the filings are not directly available on EDGAR any longer but they were disseminated to both users who then redistribute them to other platforms and users who retain them for internal use only. And then there are folks like us who collect them almost immediately and archive them and make the content available. I just can’t figure out the benefit of the additional redactions.

For our clients, I hope this helps you understand why this transformation is taking so darn long. It is more than just re-tagging the filings. As we encounter these hurdles/unexpected issues, we have to stop and consider our options to make sure we handle these in an optimal way.

As a total aside – the tail number of the plane was available in one of the earlier (and since deleted) filings. I clearly had too much time on my hands. I was curious what a search for it would reveal. The tail number is N650HA – and it is for sale. This link was active as of 8/9/2025 (Gulfstream for sale).